fun with ice cream!

I have one of the best roommate-friends a girl could ask for in Stephie Q., and she congratulated me on my MSW with an amazing gift: an ice cream attachment for my KitchenAid!!

The thing about homemade ice cream is you have to be very patient, and you have to plan ahead (freeze the bowl, make the ice cream mixture, refrigerate the ice cream mixture, churn the ice cream). I am better at one of those things than the other. . .but when we’re talking about straight-up eggs, heavy cream, half-and-half, and me being unemployed, not being able to make a batch a day is probably a good thing.

I had a bunch of buttermilk and lemons left over from my graduation party, and blueberries are starting to show up in the markets, so I decided to make some blueberry buttermilk ice cream as my inaugural batch. (Close second and next batch: Guinness milk chocolate.)

ingredients

I opted for the fancy custard-base version, but I got the heat too high and scrambled the eggs. Oops. I tried to thin them out with my immersion blender and re-strain them, but I still ended up with some egg bits in the ice cream. (You can’t tell in the finished product.)

I refrigerated the ice cream mixture overnight and then started up the mixer!!

churn, baby, churn!

Magically, after 25 minutes, I had delicious ice cream. The consistency was perfect soft-serve. I ate a little bowl and put the rest in the freezer to set up. YUM!

om nom nom

I think I taste a lot of ice cream, froyo, and sorbet in my summer.

msw

I finished grad school, and I officially have three new initials to put after my name!

Mom and Dad came out for graduation weekend.

lower legion of honor scenic vista

We saw some sights,

fun with old transit

I wore great shoes and my friends and I pretended we were at prom,

msw prom 2011

We celebrated with people who came from far and wide,

hooray for friends and family!

And the next day, we threw a party with lots of finger foods.

Menu items included:
– Pioneer Woman’s bacon-wrapped jalapeno poppers
– Pioneer Woman’s hot artichoke dip (from her cookbook)
– Stuffed mushrooms
– White bean hummus
– Deviled eggs (Mom makes the best ones with relish and mayo)
– Bacon-wrapped smokies (self-explanatory)
– Bacon-wrapped water chestnuts (soak the chestnuts in a mixture of Worcestershire, soy sauce, and balsamic vinegar for 30 minutes before wrapping them)
– Goat cheese toasts
– Caprese skewers (fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, and half a cherry tomato on a toothpick)
– Pioneer Woman’s best chocolate sheet cake ever
And lots of beer.

It feels good to be done. Next step: find a job. I’ll keep you posted.

crafty christmas

It has been a crafty holiday season!!! Since I’m still operating on a grad student budget, and since what can you get the people who have everything, I’ve done mostly homemade christmas presents this year.

• Lavender Vanilla Sugar
  I found this awesome project on Joy the Baker.
  Vanilla beans are pretty pricey (anywhere from $10 to $15 for 2 at the store), but this store on eBay sells them in bulk for cheap. Fast ship, great seller, A+++, will buy again. I got 10 organic, grade A, Madagascar Planifolia vanilla beans for just under $10, including shipping. (A word to the wise on vanilla beans: You want to spring for the good kind if you’re going to cook with them or use them directly in food; if you are making your own vanilla extract — this is a project for next year — you can go for the cheaper/lower grade kind.)
  Culinary-grade lavender can also be fairly hard to find and expensive, but I ordered mine from Washington Lavender and got 0.4 ounces (enough to make about 8 batches of sugar) for $5.50, including shipping. All their lavender is hand-harvested and organic, and they were super nice and answered all my lavender-related questions.
  I found cute containers at Michael’s and Daiso, added some festive ribbon, and voilà!!


lavender vanilla sugar

• Jars of Baking Mix!
  Gabrielle and I made a whole bunch of these two Christmases ago, and they were such a hit among my family that I’m resurrecting them this year. Gabrielle had a little cookbook full of recipes, but this site also has a lot of options.
  They’re pretty easy to put together once you get the hang of how to pack down the ingredients. To make everything fit, pack down the layer after you add each ingredient (a medium-sized bottle of Cholula is an excellent packing agent).
  And to make them pretty, the layering order is important. I’ve found it works best to put sugars at the bottom, then add ingredients like flour, cocoa powder, spices, baking powder and/or soda, and salt next (it’s nice to also stift together the flour, spices, baking powder/soda, and salt), then add oats, and put chunkier ingredients like chocolate chips, nuts, or dried fruit at the top. Packed well enough, they will survive being in checked baggage during a cross-country flight.
  Wide-mouth jars are a wise choice. And no matter what kind of jars you use, you’ll likely need to use a funnel (or fashion a funnel out of paper or paper towel).
  Tie on some ribbon, make a little card with how to turn the mix into a delicious baked good, add some puffy glitter paint, and you’re ready to give!


toffee snack cake, chocolate/butterscotch/peanut butter oat cookies, cowboy cookies, cranberry flax seed oatmeal

• Scarves, Scarves, Scarves!!
  I’ve gotten back into knitting lately, and I joined Ravelry for new project ideas and patterns.
  I made this one for my mom, and it knitted up in about 3 days of moderate-paced knitting. The pattern is on Ravelry, but you’ll have to join to see it.
  
  

  scarfing

  
  I also found this yarn that I’m kind of obsessed with for gift items. It knits up super quickly, too, and comes out looking really fluffy and cute. I originally thought my grandma might like a scarf made out of it, so I made her this one. There’s a pattern on the back of the label — but you just cast on 12 stitches and knit until the yarn is gone.
  
  

  pom-poms galore

  
  It came out so cute that I bought more in pastel green/blue and made a mini-version for Baby Margaret’s 3rd birthday, which is right before Christmas. I cast on 6 stitches instead of 12 and knitted until it was long enough.
  I’m also working on an ambitious project for John’s Christmas gift — a face/neckwarmer for snowboarding, knit in the round with 2×2 ribbing. I have some cute fleece I want to line it with once it’s done. We’ll see how that goes. It’s still very much in progress:
  
  

  neckwarmer in progress

  
  I have lots of ambitions for other projects from Ravelry for friends’ upcoming birthdays, including this one and this one.

Happy giving and getting!!

nothin but a hound dog

My parents put our dog, Mickey, to sleep today.

We got him in 1993, when he was a little less than a year old. (Yes, that made him somewhere around 18 years old!) The local animal shelter, Angels for Animals, which was then just run out of someone’s farmhouse and barn, had found him on the streets of Leetonia, Ohio. They named him Mickey Mouth because he did a hilarious yelping bark when he was happy.

Mickey and Megan on Christmas Day, 2004

He liked to play in the snow, and he loved to chase balled-up wrapping paper around and shred it to pieces on Christmas morning. Sometimes, he would find a dead duck carcass in the backyard and he’d roll around in it, then come home sheepishly because he knew my mom would be mad at him. When he wanted you to pat him, he’d come over and stick his nose under your hand and throw it back so your hand would land on his head. He had been getting sicker over the last year, and my parents had been taking pretty amazing care of him — cooking him beef stew when he wouldn’t eat anything else, helping him up and down the stairs, and so on.

Mickey on Christmas Day, 2005

He was a good dog. And he had a good run.

my heritage; or, a brief history of hillsville, pa; or, the charms of western pennsylvania

Tonight I went to my dad’s hometown: Hillsville, Pennsylvania. (It’s so backcountry, it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.) It’s just across the Ohio/Pennsylvania border — one of the places you can stand with one foot in Ohio and the other in Pennsylvania. The two bars we went to, Nite Trax and The Finish Line (formerly known as Chief’s), both had one half decorated in Steelers gear and the other half decorated in Browns gear. (But everyone wearing sports gear was repping the Steelers, duh.)

Nite Trax is so named because it’s right across from the railroad tracks that used to take the limestone mined in the quarries there at Carbon Limestone to wherever it needed to go in the Midwest, on the East Coast, and beyond. When my great-great-grandfather, Nikoli Zahaczewski (aka Nikolai Zohoševsky), moved to the United States in 1907 from Galicia, he worked at Carbon Limestone. Then, his son, my great-grandfather, John Dunchak, worked at Carbon Limestone. And my grandfather, Johnny Dunchak, worked at Carbon Limestone his whole life, too.

Somehow, miraculously, mysteriously, and somewhat sadly, my dad escaped having a Pittsburgh accent. Everyone we talked to tonight, including a few high-school friends of my dad’s, all had the accent to varying degrees. Since he grew up there too, he really should have one!! A few choice OHs:

• “People kep’ thinkin’ I was Messkin ’cause I got dark skin, so I made sure I said ‘yinz’ a lot so dey knew I wasn’.” – patron at Nite Trax
• “I couldn’ find ma Stillers lighter, and I go, ‘War’d I put it?’ An’ den I fahn it in my purse! Hah!” – bartender at Nite Trax

I always thought the town my dad grew up in was mostly Hunky, but I learned tonight that I was wrong — it’s overwhelmingly Italian. Eye-talian. Roman Catholic Italian. With lots of bathtub Madonnas (and my dad said he and his brother used to call them that). Nite Trax has homemade Italian food every Tuesday — the owner Gino’s mom comes in once a week and makes cavatelli, ravioli, meatballs, and her special spaghetti sauce. I got the cavatelli, and it was the best Italian food I’ve ever eaten, hands down. After dinner, we went on a little driving tour of the area and went through the cemetery — there was pretty much one Hunky name among the hundred-some Italian ones. (Though the family history goes that my great-great-grandfather Nikolai is buried in this cemetery, too, but no headstone remains.)

And more on the loophole in the PA smoking ban — you’re allowed to smoke in Nite Trax, in Pennsylvania, but not in Chief’s, a few miles down the road across the Ohio border. (Incidentally, Chief’s is a bar my mom and dad used to hang out at a lot when they were dating. Aww!) As the bartender at Chief’s explained, if you’re an eating-and-drinking establishment in Pennsylvania and more than 80% of your sales come from liquor, smoking is still allowed. This has been a death-sentence for Ohio bars, she said, especially ones in borderlands. (Indeed, we were the only people in Chief’s, wheras Nite Trax was packed.) A direct quote from her: “Smokin’ an’ drinkin’ — it’s the American way. It’s like peanut-butter and jelly.”

"smoking permitted" sign on the door of nite trax in hillsville, pa

Whew. It has been a whirlwind week+ here in the Mahoning Valley. I’ve reminisced, reconnected with my past, gotten pretty nostalgic, and learned things I never knew. It has been a good trip. I like my roots.

weddings! or, a wedding, at least.

My childhood BFF, Rachel, just asked me to be in her wedding!!!! We have been friends since we were about 3 years old, when we were across-the-street neighbors.  She has three sisters, so I didn’t really expect her to ask me to be a bridesmaid, but they’re going all out with a big wedding party, so I’m in! Yay!

me and rachel, circa 1988, age 4

I have never been in a wedding. And actually, unlike most people I know, who go to multiple weddings per year, I have only been to four weddings in memorable history:

1. My cousin Wendy’s wedding; Cleveland, Ohio; c. 1989 (age 5).
   I fell through a chair. Really — the chairs at the reception had these wicker-weave seats and when I sat down, the seat broke and my butt got stuck in the frame. In front of my whole family. I was pretty traumatized.
2. My cousin Kevin’s wedding; Bowling Green, Ohio; c. 1993 (age 9).
   My mom bought me a fancy dress from the Limited Too to wear — it was black taffeta with bright flowers, and I felt so grown-up in it, although I’m sure it was hideous. I remember feeling awkward about dancing.
3. My boyfriend’s friends’ wedding; Santa Cruz Mountains, California; 2008 (age 24).
   The guy I was dating at the time was videotaping the wedding for his friends; I had never met the bride or the groom. Probably the most memorable part was slow-dancing in the parking lot — they didn’t play any slow songs until we were outside and almost ready to leave, but we could still hear the music, so we danced under the stars. Aww.
4. My friends Jake and Miranda’s wedding; San Francisco, California; 2009 (age 25).
   Jake and Miranda got married at City Hall, which meant I could walk to the ceremony from my house! It was super cute and Miranda’s dad cried a lot, which was also very cute and also made me cry.

Rachel’s wedding is going to be at Cumberland Falls in Kentucky, which will be a pain to get to but should make for a nice road trip. And it’s beautiful. My goal is to have my life a lot more sorted out by then than it is now. Being as the wedding isn’t until October, 2010, I figure have plenty of time to do this.

Remembrance

Every morning for the past few weeks, I’ve been reading and meditating on the PC(USA)’s Sunday lectionary for the upcoming week. I find it centering to focus on the same set of verses every day for the whole week; tying things together further is that we are following the series at MBCC, so one of the week’s passages is also the basis for the sermon on Sunday.

One of this week’s passages is Isaiah 49:15-16:

I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

It seems simple; but really, can you imagine that? Every time God looks at his hands, he sees us there — that is how often he thinks of us. We are engraved there, in his hands — that is how close we are to him. I can’t quite get my head around it.

What is engraved on the palms of my hands? What do I think of as often as I look at them? What is so close to me, so important to me, that it exists there? What should be engraved on the palms of my hands?

——
“You were born to glow majestically and love until your hands bleed.” – Page France

Lap Cat

I really love my cat. He brings me a lot of joy. He waits at the door for me to come home, unless I come home at a time when he’s not expecting me, in which case he staggers into the living room all bleary eyed a few seconds after I open the door trying to figure out why the schedule has changed. As soon as I sit down he’s on my lap, rolling around and purring and all up in my face. And I take care of him — I buy him expensive food made specially for indoor cats so he doesn’t get super fat: I trim his claws so he doesn’t get stuck on things (or me); I clean up his puke when he eats too fast and throws up on the living room rug. Lately I’ve been letting him sit on my lap while I’m at the kitchen table, eating breakfast or Internetting or writing — encouraging bad behavior, I know. He wiggles around and tries to get comfortable, and even though he can’t, he still stays, because he just wants to be close to me.

But invariably, after he’s been calmly lounging as a lap cat for five or ten minutes, he starts to freak out. One second he’s purring and purely content, the next he inexplicably wraps his front feet around my arm and starts biting my wrist, ears back, wild look in his eyes. I usually don’t know what I’ve done to provoke him — he just goes into attack mode.

As he went from cuddling to attacking me tonight, I thought about how we do that to God. Seriously, though. God takes care of us — he provides us with the best spiritual food we could ask for; he keeps us humble and gracious so we don’t harm the people around us; he cleans up the aftermath from our overindulgences, maybe not necessarily puke, but sadness or fear or loneliness. And most of the time we’re so content; we lounge around, happy and purring, thankful to be loved and taken care of. But then sometimes, inexplicably, we turn around and — WHAM — we sink our teeth into his hand and start frantically kicking at his arm, totally ungrateful, taken over by some kind of wild anger. And he’s probably like, “Whoa, what the. . .what did I do to deserve that??”

Though I wish I didn’t have those moments of unwarranted freakout, I don’t know how to. But once I’ve gone over to the other side of the room for a bit and sulked around, I always realize how much happier I am when I’m purring on God’s lap. So I go back, of course. And he always lets me back up.

——
“Because I’m so scared of being alone, that I forgot what house I live in.” – Caedmon’s Call

family portrait

family portrait
Originally uploaded by levi mpls

Friends with whom I share my heart.

Intentional Friendship

Intentional
Originally uploaded by meganface

OG GESG.